It's been almost two years since this all went down. I remember the way my guts were mixed up when I first started walking north from the Mexican border, how the contents of my stomach felt liquefied and tangled: fear and awe were woven together inside of there. It felt like I was about to leap from a precipice. The distance ahead was totally incomprehensible, I tried not to think about it. The sky was too huge, too bright. The desert landscape was strange, unlike anything I had known, the dust clung to my skin. I wanted to turn around, to go home. I wanted the lizards to stop pestering me, the sun to stop following me. Eventually, though, my head became steady, the muscles in my legs began to show new definitions. I adjusted, adapted, kept walking.

It was the beginning of an experience that would eventually grow inside of me and gestate into something that utterly consumed me, lifted me up, amplified me, drove me crazy. I wanted to become stripped down: to possess almost nothing, to be literally homeless, to forget who I was, to disappear. It was an experiment to see not only how far I could get along the trail, but also to see how deeply I could submerge myself into the nuances of the landscape. The longer I was out there, it seemed, the further I fell into the world of ten thousand things, of mountains and rivers, of rocks and birds. I wanted, most of all, to recover the experience of being outside and to rediscover an intimacy with landscape that has been lost in an era of electricity and automation. I wanted to step outside of abstractions and into reality.

The best way to become intimate with a place is to pack a bag and walk. By walking, we sense the essence of a place: subtle changes in landscape, climate, vegetation type, geology. We experience the meaning of geography. By walking for months, we begin to sense these variations on a continental scale, we begin to sense the bigness of the world and the smallness of ourselves.

While walking, I was haunted by a phrase that I remembered from Samuel Beckett. It was something to the effect of, "I can't go on, I must go on". It seemed to perfectly encapsulate the absurdity of it all: the daily endurance of heat and pain, aching muscles and enormous hunger, blisters, homesickness, the constant tension between wanting to quit and simultaneously choosing not to. There was this sense that I never really understood why I was doing it, going on. I was sometimes plauged by a feeling of sincere futility, that the loneliness and physical pain was just plain pointless. To work through such feelings, and to go ahead in the face of absurdity, was one of the most important things I learned on the trail. Something deep inside compelled me to keep hiking. When my friend, Nick Gulig, asked me why, I struggled to come up with adequate reasons and resorted to saying, "I just have to do this."

These journals are the hard data of what went on. They are my best attempt to bring back something sensical from an experience that would otherwise seem unreal. Over the months, I carried small pocket sized notebooks (the less weight, the better) in my pack and tried to be diligent about writing. Even when I was too tired to lift a pen, I at least tried to scrawl out a single sentence. I have arranged the journal entries in chronological order, from spring to autumn. As well, they are sequenced geographically: from the Mexican border, through the Sierra Nevada, into the Cascades, up to the Canadian border. From south to north. I have also included the mass email correspondences that were sent out as updates to friends and family from the various towns that I visited along the trail.

Even now, years later, I continue to be haunted by the trail. I'll be standing in line somewhere or walking down the sidewalk, and suddenly I'll be back there, completely transported. The parched air of the Mojave will scald the back of my neck or, for just a moment, I'll return to my frigid body, hunkered down on a saddle in the north Cascades, cooking ramen noodles and reading maps. The sun will be setting behind a high wall of peaks and I will know that in a few miles, I'll have to hike into the valley and start looking for a place to sleep. I will know that the next morning, I will wake up and keep walking north.

I still miss the trail, everyday.